Every business craves a higher return on their online investment; more email subscribers, more readers, more conversions, and ultimately more revenue. Email marketing can be an asset towards accomplishing this goal. We’ll find out how, shortly. But first, three powerful stats;

Email marketing has a Return on Investment (ROI) of $32 for every $1. PPC, in comparison, returns a paltry $2 for every $1 spent.

Up to 81% of SMBs depend on email for customer acquisition. Another 80% consider email their primary retention tool.

Up to 81% of SMBs depend on email for customer acquisition. Another 80% consider email their primary retention tool.

These stats tell us one thing – any serious digital marketer cannot overlook email marketing. Not only does it promise a huge market but that ROI is simply incredible.

Email Marketing Promises Even Greater Value to Bloggers

It’s not just the market and average ROI. Particularly for bloggers, email marketing promises a lot more.

You own the email subscribers

Not many digital marketing platforms give you control over your contacts. Social media networks, for instance, go as far as to control what posts you can share and the fraction of your followers you can reach. On Facebook, for example, you can only reach about 12% of your followers and your posts can be deleted if deemed “inappropriate.” Email marketing gives you complete control.

Email marketing generates plenty of traffic

According to a 2018 report by Constant Contest Knowledge Base, the average email open rate (fraction of recipients that open the emails they receive) is an impressive 41.96% on mobile and 58.04% on desktop. The average CTR, meanwhile, is 7.06%. That’s 7 in every 100 contacts clicking through to view your blog! Even paid ads struggle to deliver this CTR.

Email personalization drives even more traffic

Bloggers often turn to buyer personas to meet personalization needs. Unfortunately, even the best buyer persona can’t fully meet personalization needs. The good news is – email personalization can! You can craft your emails in a way that specifically addresses the needs of that individual recipient. And guess what, such deep personalization boosts CTR by up to 50%!

It’s easy to track and measure

Measurement is the key to sustained business growth and there isn’t an easier marketing channel to measure than email. You can track pretty much every metric; from delivery rates to open rates and CTR to conversions.

How to Use Email Marketing to Grow Your Blog

Every blogging campaign is different. But, there are a few basic rules to email marketing success;

Find the right email platform: There are several email marketing platforms to choose from. Three that stand out are AWeber, Get Response, and MailChimp. Picking any of these three would be a great start.

Develop your drip campaign: Customers go through an entire journey before making a purchase. It’s important to map out this journey beforehand and send emails in accordance with the journey.

Optimize your emails: Work on your subject lines, email length, sending times, personalization, and CTAs to get the most from your emails. Also, don’t forget to A/B test your campaign.

Optimize your opt-in forms: Also known as lead capture forms, your opt-in forms must be great both aesthetically and functionally. Use a catchy headline, include a compelling CTA, and design to impress.

Now, You Know What To Do

If you’ve not been using email to grow your blogging campaign, now is the time to begin. If you’re already on the bandwagon, use the four tips above to extract more value from your campaign.

The benefits of blogging on your website are quite obvious. Aside from the key value of search exposure, blogs help businesses generate new leads as well as keep existing customers happy. Blogging also boosts SEO performance, builds authority, and supports other digital marketing initiatives. This makes finding the right topics to blog about vital.

While you can’t always wow everyone, it’s critical that you consistently come up with resource topics. Therefore, not only engaging the majority of your readers but also add value to their lives. And, of course, are related to your business. Here’s how to find these topics.

Take inspiration from your blog’s comments

One of the best sources of blog topics is the comments from your previous blog posts. This especially applies if you have a dedicated reader community that’s always looking forward to your posts. After reading, they’re likely to have an opinion on the posts. Some will question your position on the subject, others will side with you, and then there are those who’ll share their views. Use these responses (positive or negative) as new blog topic ideas. If need be, ask the commenter to elaborate and use their points to build an outline for your next blog post.

Check out what your competitors are doing

There are several advantages of checking with the competition. For instance, it gives you a glimpse into what works for businesses in your industry. Also, you’re guaranteed to learn about keywords you previously didn’t know about. The great news is that there are tools designed to simplify this job, including; BottleNose, Topsy, and BuzzSumo. A quick search on BuzzSumo will not only reveal your competitor’s last blog post, but you will also discover the keywords they used as well as the level of engagement (traffic, shares, comments, etc) the post received.

Use headline generator tools

Aside from competitor comparison tools, there are tools designed specifically to generate blogging headline ideas. You simply enter a keyword (or keyword phrase) and a list of possible topics is generated. Such tools include SeoPressor, BlogAbout, and HubSpot’s blog topic generator. A word of advice though – always conduct keyword research first before using headline generator tools. This way, you get to kill two birds with one stone – you get top performing keywords, guaranteeing favorable Google ranking, as well as generate top headlines for maximum clicks.

Leverage social media networks

Social media is where all the hot topics are discussed these days. Whether it’s consumers arguing over how to sell a home or marketers promoting seasonal offers, you’re certain to uncover several new topics to blog about. Quora, in particular, is an excellent place to take your blog topics search. You can ask a question and see how people respond to it. You can also read other people’s posts and replies. All of these can lead to new ideas. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit are other social media networks to consider.

Repurpose old content

If your business engages in digital marketing, it’s likely that you have hundreds if not thousands of articles sitting on your website and at least as many videos, infographics, industry reports, and email newsletters on your server. Whenever you find yourself short of blogging topic ideas, feel free to comb through these old content pieces for inspiration. You can pick up a whitepaper you published 3 years ago and turn it into a blog post based on the latest updates; locate an outdated blog post and add a few points to bring your readers up to date, or turn the last video you uploaded to YouTube into a short post.

Essentially, the options are there and the benefits of new content on your website are significant for traffic that can turn into new customers. Take time to use some of these ideas and start a new blog post this week!

The internet is saturated with content. According to data from Smart Insights, 1,440 blogs are posted every minute, translating to a whopping 2,073,600 blogs every day. That’s before you account for videos and social media posts. This level of saturation presents a new problem for content marketers – difficulty attaining the desired reach.

One way to get around this problem is to pursue sharability i.e. making your content highly shareable.

Look at it this way; if 1,000 visitors read your content and share it with their network (say 30 people per reader), your blog post would have already reached 1,000 + (1,000*30) = 31,000 people. Considering that digital consumers highly trust each other (70% will read posts recommended by fellow consumers compared to those promoted by brands), you can expect to reach a lot more people than you would through direct reach.

Wondering how to create content readers will like and want to share? The following are five tips to get you started.

Understand Your Target Audience

Many marketers begin writing articles and blog posts without even understanding the people these content pieces are meant for. How do you expect to write what they want to read if you don’t understand them? How are you going to address their pain points if you haven’t taken the time to learn about their needs? It’s impractical. Begin by learning the; who, why, what, when, and where of your readers.

Who are they?

Why are they online?

What do they need?

When do they need it?

Where do they get their information?

If you can successfully answer all these questions, you’re ready to create content your audience will like.

Choose Value-Adding Topics

Now that you fully understand your audience, it’s time to choose topics to write about. Ensure that the topics you choose add value to the reader’s life. If you’re not solving a problem, tell them something new; something they haven’t heard before. “How To…” topics are some of the most shared posts for this reason – they actually solve a problem.

Other commonly shared topics include; “X Tips,” guides, and checklists. Aside from that, content that provides new information is also highly appreciated and frequently shared.

Present Your Content in the Right Format

The content type you choose will directly determine your reach.

Videos, for instance, are on the rise. But, is your audience looking for videos? Do they frequently watch YouTube and the likes? If not, then expecting them to like and share your videos is a pipe dream. Webinars are also very effective and come with a high ROI. But not all audiences are looking for webinars. A consumer looking to buy a pair of shorts online, for instance, won’t be interested in a webinar.

The idea is to choose a content type that fits both the message and the audience.

Optimize Your Posts for Sharing

Yes, you can make your content easier to share. How? By including features on your blog, website, or video channels that reduce the effort needed to share the posts. With blogs, for instance, you can include social share buttons to allow readers to share the content they like in a single touch of a click. Certain types of content such as industry reports can even carry these social share buttons within the content body.

Finally, with certain content types such as videos and infographics, you can include embed codes to allow other website owners to share the content on their blogs.

Oh, and don’t forget to ask for shares. Readers are 150% more likely to share your posts if you personally ask for the share.

An email autoresponder is one of the best ways to connect with your audience and build a relationship with them. Essentially a series of emails sent to subscribers in a pre-determined order and frequency. The strategy is very efficient and very cost-effective.

The question is – how do you create a winning email autoresponder series? Here are 6 steps that experts at Opt-In Monster, Crazy Egg, and QuickSprout recommend.

Step #1: Establish Goals for your Autoresponder Series

There are 3 common purposes of email autoresponder campaigns.

Send new subscribers a “welcome” sequence.

Make sales on autopilot.

Promote up-sells and cross-sells.

Whatever your reason is, remember to follow the SMART goals mantra.

Step #2: Segment Your Email List

Segmentation is breaking down your email list into smaller groups of contacts who share certain characteristics. For instance, you can categorize your contacts based on demographics, interests, personas, or stage in the sales cycle. According to one study by MailChimp, email list segmentation results in a 14.4% increase in open rates, a 62.83% increase in click-through rates, and an 8.54% reduction in unsubscribe rates.

Step#3: Select the Right Email Marketing Provider

Fortunately, there are several quality options to pick from. These include MailChimp, AWeber, ActiveCampaign, and InfusionSoft. If you’re new to email marketing software and don’t know much about these services, just pick either MailChimp or AWeber.

They are the two most popular options used by nearly 90% of beginners thanks to their reliability, support, and a wide range of features.

Step #4: Map Out the Autoresponder Sequence

How long do you want the campaign to last? How many days, weeks, or months? Also, how many emails do you intend to send over that period? There are no universal rules in both cases. But a good rule of thumb is that your autoresponder series should last as long as your sales cycle. The important thing is to send enough emails to accomplish your goals.

Next, decide on a sending frequency. After how long will you be sending the next email? Again, there are no universal rules here so choose what works. With that covered, sit down and decide the message you want to convey in each of the emails.

Step #5: Write the Actual Emails

This can be the hardest part of the process. Consider hiring a professional copywriter to write the emails on your behalf.

The emails must focus on the subscribers’ needs, not yours.

Every email must be personalized to make it relevant and valuable to the recipient.

Subject lines are critical to high open and click-through rates.

Reread the emails to make sure these requirements are met and, if possible, test the series with close friends or workers to gauge their effectiveness.

Step #6: Monitor and Improve

Perfection comes with practice. After you roll out the autoresponder campaign, don’t just sit and wait. Instead, track the performance of your emails and see where you need to improve. Keep a close eye on open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates.

If you can follow all these six steps, rest assured you’ll have an email autoresponder campaign that’s guaranteed to consistently earn your leads and help you close sales. An autoresponder is a key part of the digital marketing funnel sequence so important to your business marketing today.

One of the key advantages of digital marketing is you can track, measure, and tweak your campaigns immediately. If you feel your AdWords campaign isn’t working, change the ad copy, ad size, or other factors. The same applies to your blog articles. Play around with the content type, length, and posting frequency until you find a working formula.

With that in mind, let’s look at the four most impactful adjustments you can make to your digital marketing campaign for accelerated growth.

Focus on Mobile

In 2016 mobile overtook PC as the preferred device for internet access. Currently, more than 65% of consumers prefer mobile, and nearly 30% use mobile only to access the internet. Therefore if you ignore mobile marketing, you’re ignoring a huge chunk of your potential customers.

Pro Tip:

To take advantage of the huge and ever-growing mobile market; make your site mobile responsive. Create mobile-friendly content with AMP (accelerated mobile pages), get local with Google My Business, and consider text message marketing.

Make Engagement Easy

Marketing Week recently conducted a study to find if people understand the meaning and purpose of engagement in marketing. The results weren’t shocking; up to 25% of respondents didn’t even know the business definition of engagement. However, about 38.5% knew the definition but didn’t take the metric seriously.

Pro Tip:

It’s important to understand and appreciate engagement as a marketing metric. Focus on ways to make engagement easy. Options to consider including are making your Calls to Action (CTAs) easy to find. Additionally, integrate social media into your website with social buttons and social login. As well, provide a comment section for feedback. Use email to remain in touch, and chat with your community on social media, chat tools, and online public forums/blogs.

Use Designated Landing Pages

According to Marketing Sherpa, a whopping 44% of B2B clicks are directed to home pages, with an even bigger number for B2C. As a result, you’re missing out big time if you’re in this category. For maximum conversions, you need specialized landing pages for your campaigns. Why? Because landing pages are designed for lead generation and your homepage isn’t. Landing pages are easier to navigate, have fewer distractions, and don’t require scrolling like home pages.

Pro Tip:

Find a professional to create exceptional landing pages. More importantly, ensure that each campaign has its own landing page.

Test, Monitor, and Test Again

Like everything else in life, no marketing campaign is perfect. For example, it doesn’t matter if you’re converting 50% of your leads; with a few improvements, you could hit 60%. Therefore this makes testing very important. Testing allows you to determine what’s working and what isn’t. It can be useful in predicting future trends which help you stay ahead of the competition.

The average SMB spends $75,000 on digital marketing, or just over $214,000 on marketing yearly, representing up to 12% of revenue. A solid email list can significantly reduce these costs as well as simplify the marketing process.

Here’s why. Email is the king of business communication. According to Exact Target, 46% of consumers prefer emails, 36% prefer text, and only 13% prefer social media. And sending email is extremely affordable even if you hire a specialist. And email providers charge peanuts for their services. AWeber, for instance, charges $30/month.

Above all, with an email list, you have a sales-ready market. You’re not making cold calls. Put these factors together and you’ll see the high ROI potential of a great email list.

Email has the Potential to Become a Large Part of Your Income

You might not believe it, but there are people out there who make quite a bit of money on their email lists.

Michael Hyatt is the perfect example. An award-winning author of a best-selling book, Michael openly says that his email list is his biggest asset. “It is my number one business priority and asset,” he says. “This multi-million dollar business wouldn’t have come to be without my email list. The list accounts for 90% of my income.”

A strong email list can become a key source of revenue for you too.

So, Grow Your List to Grow Your Business

When your email list expands, your business grows. Why? Because you’re adding more sales-ready leads to the funnel!

We’ve all been there. After doing a fantastic job getting thousands of people to sign up for your email newsletters and you find yourself with nothing to say.

You need to keep them on board with exciting newsletters. Otherwise, you might not only lose their attention but could also lose the customers themselves. What kind of newsletters can you send to keep them hooked?

Here are 7 types of newsletters that you can share with your email list to keep them excited.

Remix an old blog post

Let’s begin with an easy one. You write blog posts all the time. By now, you probably have thousands of posts published on your blog. Whenever you experience “writer’s block,” feel free to reinvent one of those posts and send it as an email newsletter. Just make sure to update it so the information is relevant. Also, add a few ideas and tips to freshen up the piece. This is a great way to freshen the content on your blog and get Google indexing your website again.

Your success story

People are always looking for inspiration. It doesn’t matter how many other stories they’ve heard out there; if you have something that can energize and encourage them to pursue their goals, they’ll always have an ear for you. If you can do this while staying humble, rest assured of winning plenty of hearts along the way.

“X Mistakes I Made”

…Or something along that line. Everyone who wants to succeed will always be looking for ways to avoid obvious mistakes. Why not share a few things you got wrong over the years and how you overcame the challenges? Why not share a few things that you didn’t know at the beginning and how understanding them can accelerate the journey to success? Readers will like your story.

Answer frequently asked questions

In the time you’ve been in business, you’ve had customers and prospects ask you all kinds of questions. It’s also likely that some questions keep popping up over and over. Use your email newsletters to provide answers to those questions.

Share some exciting news

This could be news about anything; your business, the industry, products, technology, and so forth. As long as it’s something you know that your contacts not have heard yet, share it. For instance, if you’re introducing a new product, share that. Share news about an upcoming promo or contest. The list is endless.

Traffic/growth/income reports

Sharing progress reports with your list also works well. It could be graphs and stats showing how your traffic has increased over the past years. It could be growth reports showing your revenue and how far you’ve come. Or, it could be income reports. Sharing these pieces of information tends to increase consumer confidence in a brand.

Free downloads

Finally, whenever you run out of ideas for your email newsletter campaign, consider giving away a freebie. A popular option is e-books. E-books showcase your knowledge and strengthen the bond between you and your list. What’s more, freebies have been proven to prime consumers for paid products.

These 7 ideas should keep your contacts engaged and informed year round.

Email marketing is not dead– not even remotely close to dead. In fact, data shows that the impact of email marketing may actually be increasing every year. A record number of new email accounts are still being created every year. The average email user is receiving more emails today than at any other time in the past.

Rather than being used as a form of interpersonal communication, as it was at its onset, it’s now used as a central component of eCommerce transactions. Because your local utility company and your cell phone provider will send you email notifications when a bill is due, and a corresponding receipt once you’ve paid, brands know you’ll eventually check your email. It’s only natural that it’d be used as part of any serious online sales effort.

Obviously, there are two basic steps to any email marketing effort:

Collect email addresses.

Send out a newsletter, or market to your list.

Strategies, best practices, and variations on how to go about accomplishing these two steps will differ from one industry to the next.

Try these four powerful email marketing optimization strategies:

Provide value

If you only send sales emails, be prepared to lose a lot of subscribers. Resulting in a rather dismal conversion rate. Send valuable content, intensely-targeted to your list, and you’ll earn the right to pitch your prospects. They’ll respect you, trust your authority in the space, and will have had enough chances to have considered doing business with you prior to your official ask.

Design your funnels

Don’t be discouraged if you’ve been lumping your whole list into one category and emailing every subscriber on each campaign. Moving forward, you can begin to sculpt out defined list sub-sections. For example, a ‘previous customer’ segment is a no-brainer. Segmented lists for specific business objectives and for specific marketing campaigns not only allows greater granularity in targeting, but it also gives you a greater ability to experiment.

Blog optimization

If your email marketing efforts are stagnant, you may want to look further up the chain. You might have done a great job converting new site visitors into email subscribers, but have you built any relationship with them prior to their opting-in.

The answer to this can make the difference between a “who is this emailing me?”-response or an “Oh, these guys have a course?” type of response.

The ‘tripwire’ trick

This is as crafty and slick as it sounds. A tripwire is a very small ask you put directly after an email list subscription in each of your funnels. A tripwire might be $5 or $7 and it has a psychological reason for being used. Studies have shown that people are more likely to purchase from brands they’ve already done business with rather than ones they’ve never bought from.

Therefore, it makes smart business sense to get a quick, low-cost sale from as great a percentage of your list as possible. As a result, they experience what it’s like being your customer. Thus eventually make a follow-up purchase.

No matter what tips or email marketing strategies you try, just make sure you don’t write-off email marketing altogether. There is money in your list. All you need to do is grow it and get better at harvesting it’s potential.

If you’re already using email marketing to generate leads, convert sales, and delight customers; you’re doing a great job! Aside from boasting a phenomenal ROI, email marketing is also the most effective way to reach customers and prospects.

To help boost your ROI even further, today, we want to give you a few tips on how to use confirmation emails to drive lead generation and sales.

You probably already know about confirmation emails – the emails you usually send to customers who’ve just made a purchase, thanking them for buying from your store and asking them to come back.

Use them to up-sell and cross-sell

Up-selling and cross-selling are two of the most effective marketing strategies. According to one Nielsen study, consumers actually love it when sellers offer new product options. It shows them that the seller cares.

Consumers prefer to buy products from brands they are already familiar with. Put these two factors together, and you have up-sells and cross-sells contributing to between 10% and 30% of e-commerce revenues.

With this in mind, when sending the purchase confirmation email, use the opportunity to suggest a complementary product. For instance, if one buys a shaving razor, ask if they’d be interested in shave cream. If they’ve just purchased a phone, ask if they need a phone cover, and so on.

Use the emails to recover abandoned shopping carts

Shopping cart abandonment is a huge challenge in the e-commerce industry. Last year alone, more than 70% of shopping carts were abandoned midway through transactions, costing merchants $4.6 billion in the process.

Use emails to reach out to consumers and convince them to go back and complete the purchase. For instance, you can send an email asking about the difficulties the shopper experienced on your site and offer to provide help.

Send a confirmation email alerting consumers about discounts on the items in the abandoned shopping carts. This works particularly well if the consumer was window shopping. A discount offer can make them change their mind and return to complete the purchase.

Use confirmation emails to promote your brand & expand your reach

There are a couple of ways to do this. For instance, use emails to ask consumers to share the experience on social media. In the email, ask them to “share” the message, providing buttons to your preferred social media networks to make the sharing easy.

Another option is to ask them to sign up for your newsletters, read your blog, or subscribe to your YouTube channel. A consumer who thoroughly enjoyed the shopping experience will not hesitate to do so.

Finally, ask consumers to rate your business and leave reviews on popular review platforms. These ratings and reviews will convince other shoppers to consider your brand.

The best part, email campaign so the emails are sent exactly when they need to be sent, further increasing your conversion chances.

Back in the late ‘90s, only a handful of businesses had an online presence, so digital marketing wasn’t very competitive. But it’s a completely different story nowadays. Organizations of all sizes, industries, and sectors are on the internet today, each vying for the attention of their target audience. In order to market your website, you need to optimize it. Fortunately, there are many ways to do this.

To successfully grow your website, it must be:

Fast

Slow websites are not appealing to both people and search engines. Visitors close websites that take too long to load, while Google’s algorithm ranks them lower in search results. Also, with so many other websites to check out, there’s no reason why people won’t switch to faster websites instead. So if you don’t want people clicking X on your homepage, remove the clutter such as too many third-party widgets and non-optimized images.

User-friendly

A complicated layout drives people away. It’s better to stick to something clean, simple, and usable. Ensure that navigation is straightforward so that visitors can browse without getting lost. Also, don’t forget to make your site fit for mobile devices. Because most people use their smartphones and tablets to go online, it’s important for your site to be easily viewable on smaller screens.

Substantial

Content is still king. Marketing can only do so much like attracting more visitors. But engaging with them and making them stay? That’s all about content. Fortunately, you don’t have to rely on just articles if writing long blocks of text is not your strongest suit. With today’s multimedia options, you can create infographics, make posters, shoot videos, produce music, etc. It doesn’t matter what form the content comes in as long as it’s high-quality.

SEO-ready

SEO is still one of the biggest factors that help determine the success of a website. Therefore, don’t ignore SEO when designing your website. Fill out the meta title and meta description, add relevant keywords to your post titles and subheadings, and lastly, supply alt tags with descriptive text for your photos, add keywords to URLs. These little things go a long way in making your website more discoverable by people and search engines alike.

Subscriber-ready

Getting visitors is not enough. What really matters is turning them into potential leads, and one way to do that is capturing their information via a subscription box. But to get people to subscribe, the subscription box should be visible without being intrusive and enticing without being pushy.

Also, it should ask for minimum information such as email address, as opposed to a detailed form with multiple fields. People don’t have the time to fill out a full questionnaire, plus they are less likely to share a lot of information on a website they still don’t know well enough.

Just keep it basic in the beginning; once you’ve established a good relationship with your subscribers, you can ask for more details later on.

A successful marketing campaign begins with a good foundation. Once you’ve built a website with the aforementioned characteristics, you can expect to get stronger results from your campaigns.